“Stop that!” I told my son, sharply reprimanding him for stomping on and crushing a flower during our afternoon walk. He looked up at me as if I had two heads on my shoulders.
“Why?” he quickly responded. His tone wasn’t disrespectful or obstinate, so I stopped and asked him to lift his foot off the flower he was treating with such disrespect and disdain. As soon as he did, the logic of his question became clearly apparent. He had stepped on a dandelion.
He continued looking up at me and matter-of-factly stated,
“It’s a weed, Daddy. It needed to be stepped on. It doesn’t matter how many times you step on it, or what you do to try to get rid of it, Mama says they just keep coming back!”
His rationalization made me laugh out loud. As we resumed our walk, the reality of the life lesson I’d just witnessed hit me with ever increasing clarity and weight. That week had been a difficult one for me. I had found out that a close friend’s relative had died of cancer, and there were some unfortunate and scary changes happening at work. I had felt stomped on that week. I’m sure you’ve felt that way as well. Maybe you feel that way more often than every once in a while. Unfortunately, in this world this is the reality of the human condition—even for Christians. Jesus told His disciples: “Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world” (John 16:33, NLT).
Additionally, the apostle Paul, writing to the Christians in Corinth about their present difficulties, reminded them of this reality in some very stark words. “We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair. We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed.” (2 Corinthians 4:8, 9, NLT).
Research shows that when we deal with depression and anxiety, it’s easy to quickly despair and lose perspective and hope. When that happens, some people will turn to unhealthy coping skills, such as drugs, alcohol, food, sex, pornography, unhealthy relationships, and ultimately suicide.
But you have this promise that when you belong to Christ, you will never be abandoned or destroyed.
Paul ends this chapter with these hopeful words: “For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever” (verses 17, 18, NLT).
